Patients with COVID-19 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and diabetes shortly after infection, according to a UK report.
The risks are significant, especially during the first three months after catching the virus, but they tend to decrease.
Researchers at King’s College London recommend that “doctors advise their patients that they are recovering from COVID-19 to reduce the risk of diabetes through a healthy diet and exercise.”
How was this discovered?
It is now well recognized that COVID-19, in addition to its own set of symptoms, “can cause disease throughout the body, probably causing pathways that cause inflammation.”
In fact, two years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, The New Daily reported that COVID-19 could be causing healthy people to develop type 2 diabetes.
The new study not only confirms that this is so, but gives an idea of how often this happens.
It also analyzes the incidence of heart disease in previously healthy patients.
They did so by analyzing the medical records of more than 428,000 patients with COVID-19 and the same number of control individuals (people who had never had the disease), compared by age and sex.
The analysis showed that patients with COVID-19 had 81% more diagnoses of diabetes in the first four weeks after contracting the virus.
Researchers at King’s College also found that patients’ risk remained high at 27% until 12 weeks after infection.
COVID-19 was also associated with a six-fold increase in overall cardiovascular diagnoses, “primarily due to the development of pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs) and irregular heartbeats.”
The risks do not seem to be long term
It was found that those patients who did not develop heart disease or diabetes, in terms of their risk, eventually returned to normal.
The return to baseline diabetes risk was nearly six months.
The risk of a new diagnosis of heart disease began to decrease five weeks after infection and returned to baseline or lower levels between 12 weeks and one year.
It’s a potentially long time to wait until everything is clear, but “fortunately there doesn’t seem to be a long-term increase in the incidence of these conditions for patients who have contracted the virus.”
The lead author, Dr. Emma Rezel-Potts, an associate researcher in translational epidemiology and public health, said in a prepared statement: “While it is in the first four weeks that patients with COVID-19 are most at risk of these. results, the risk of developing diabetes mellitus continues to increase for at least 12 weeks.
“Clinical and public health interventions focused on reducing the risk of diabetes among those recovering from long-term COVID-19 can be very beneficial.”